At Work; Coming to Terms With the Past

By Barbara Presley Noble

Published: December 19, 1993

FOUR years ago, counselors under her supervision at Radcliffe Career Services, a campus-community counseling agency based at Radcliffe College, began coming to Phyllis Stein, unsure of how to react to a disquieting new response to the usual career-counselor opening line, "Tell me about yourself."

"It would be some version of the following," said Ms. Stein, director of the agency in Cambridge, Mass. " 'I'm X, I want you to know I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I'm here in this office to discuss my career issues, but childhood experience is affecting my work life." After hearing that refrain a half dozen times, Ms. Stein recalled, "I said, 'Whoops, we need guidance.' "

Finding none in the library, Radcliffe Career Services did what academically inclined institutions tend to do in such circumstances. It began developing a knowledge base on the topic by writing grants, sponsoring calls for papers and conferences and generally putting the word out on the prodigious academic networks of the Northeast. Four years later, the demand for sensitivity to the concerns of "survivors" -- the therapeutic term of art -- has not abated, Ms. Stein said. Last month, a forum at Radcliffe on the impact of childhood sexual abuse on adult workplace relationships drew an audience of nearly a hundred men and women, many of them survivors.

The mere existence of such a forum is testimony to the increased public awareness of the problem of childhood abuse. But it was also a call by the five panelists -- one survivor and four career counseling and mental health professionals -- for more attention to be paid to the work-relationship consequences of childhood abuse, an aspect of recovering from trauma sometimes seen as secondary to establishing the ability to form and maintain personal relationships.

"Sexual abuse can potentially affect all relationships," said Dr. Carolyn A. Rieder, a psychologist who has worked with abuse survivors for more than a decade, in an interview after her presentation at the forum. "Workplace relationships are particularly significant because they are often a reenactment of family dynamics and family issues."

Abuse, she pointed out, usually occurs at the hands of people with authority in the child's life, including parents and parental figures, which is to say, the very adults who are most responsible for the child's sense of safety and well-being. Abuse massively undermines a child's ability to trust and form bonds with other people, and it plants fundamental confusion about the boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate behavior that will almost certainly resonate in adulthood.

Survivors may experience chronic depression, eating disorders, low self-esteem, suicidal thoughts and difficulties with trust or intimacy, in other words, mild to severe dysfunction that clearly could affect their ability to work -- and clearly requires help from a professional.

But humans, particularly children, are resilient, and survivors can live with a fair amount of emotional chaos without becoming flat-out unable to function. The strategies children use to cope with abuse -- detaching themselves emotionally, for example -- may survive into adulthood, to become embedded in relationships until they become too frustrating to live with. "Coping strategies carried into adulthood can become problematic as a survivor tries to establish a stable identity within the workplace," Dr. Rieder said. Or as the one survivor on the panel put it: "Every single aspect of my workplace experience was affected by the residuals of childhood sexual abuse, beginning with choice of career."

IN fact, survivors often do choose careers that tap their survival skills. Survivors may sometimes be career underachievers because the abuse erodes their self-esteem and leads to a disablingly negative self-image. Or they may be "over- " or "superperformers," out of a sense that what they do is never adequate -- or because problems with boundaries prevent them from setting limits on what they are willing to do.

Ann H. Dart, assistant director of Radcliffe Career Services and a clinical social worker in private practice, said her clients tell her of feeling like an overwhelmed and continually humiliated victim at work, and of feeling at risk of being retraumatized. "They may feel they have no voice, that they must remain passive observers on the sidelines, rather than active participants in shaping their careers and work lives," she said.

It is not unusual, Ms. Dart continued, for a survivor to experience intense anger, sometimes disproportionate to the precipitating event, and she -- or he, though all the panelists acknowledged they have little experience with male clients -- may be "at risk of having those feelings spill out in the workplace in a way that may not be in her best work interests," Ms. Dart said.

In recovery, many survivors learn to give up the useful but restrictive skills that helped them survive, for a more open, inquiring approach to life -- to begin thinking, Ms. Dart said, "there's a better way to work." HELP FOR SURVIVORS OF ABUSE

SURVIVORS may be robbed of their innocence in childhood, but they should by no means expect to lead doomed lives. Dr. Carolyn A. Rieder, a psychologist with expertise in sexual abuse issues and an instructor in the Psychiatry Department at Harvard Medical School, says they have available to them a range of coping strategies for dealing with workplace issues:

* It is critical to develop a broad-based support system so survivors can express their feelings to a number of compassionate people. "Psychotherapy can help survivors establish a sense of safety, to develop clear boundaries, to differentiate between the past and the present, to identify issues that are being reenacted in the workplace," she said.

* Survivors might want to decrease the level of stress at work when they are overwhelmed with feelings or symptoms related to past abuse. Options include reducing the work load, moving to a position of less responsibility, arranging flexible hours, or taking a few days off or a leave of absence.

* To supplement one-on-one therapy, explore support groups and group therapy.